The crowd gathered at a Center City bar for the Erotic Literary Salon heard everything from a short story that detailed a woman coming home early to find her boyfriend masturbating, to an excerpt from a novel describing what would happen if “Don Draper had sex with Zac Efron.”
Mayer, who has a doctorate from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, had the idea for the salon while working on her dissertation. She found some older women who were suffering from a lagging sex drive. When she suggested that they read erotica to jump-start their libidos, they balked.
“It amazed me,” said Mayer, 61. “They were like, ‘I can’t do that. My husband would think terribly of me.’ If erotica was mainstreamed, I wouldn’t have gotten that kind of reaction.”
So she began the mainstreaming.